Can you say ‘fck’ in your B2B marketing?
(Before I start, a side note… I originally had the URL: www.peterlevitan.com/issayingfuckcool I now know that Google does not like the word Fuck – so I took out the “U” from any Google heat seeking search missile.) We’ll see if this post gets indexed now. See at the bottom of this post for an article about Google’s no-mas potty-mouth.)
I have a client, a brilliant agency client in the data-marketing space. A real data scientist. He grows brands leveraging the best of Adobe and the Google Marketing Platform (here is how Google describes the GMP):
Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help you plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Google Marketing Platform helps you deliver more relevant and effective marketing, while ensuring that you respect your customers’ privacy and give them control over their data.
Data marketing rules. But, he has a problem. He only aims to work with clients that really want to leverage data to grow their business. Apparently, it is difficult to find the clients that actually GET IT. That said, he gets lots of inquiries. However, many are either poor leads for many reasons (many need lots of training) or are not willing to take the multi-month plunge/commitment to work into a very successful data-driven program.
‘Fuck’
Last week we discussed the use of the word ‘fuck’ to arrest attention and to help cull out the serious leads from the explorers. In this case, can you say ‘fuck’ on your home page? Essentially, something like this (just an example)…
We Are Looking For The Best And Brightest Clients That Want To Fucking Kill It Using The World’s Best Data-Marketing.
I pointed to Gary Veynerchuck as an example of a media personality that uses ‘fuck’ a lot to, yup, help cull out the serious leads from the explorers. It is difficult to paraphrase Gary but his mantra is hey, get the fuck on board the digital train.
Find Your Active Words
This is not a long blog post on the use of challenging words. But, I do want to make that point that you might want to consider actually telling the people that visit your home page that you are looking for the right fucking clients. The use of the word might even net you the balls to the wall clients that you want.
If the ‘F’ word scares you… just try having some attitude.
Oh, the Google article:
F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs.
bill abramovitz says
As long as you know who the fuck you’re talking to, it could work brilliantly. I call words like this crappy prospect repellant. Visuals can serve the same purpose. Would it be less risky to use a metric like time on page or visit duration to zero in on the serious few?